N.J. official who dehumanized immigrants just wants us to understand Trumpism | …

Rick Blood, now the former deputy mayor of Mendham, is “most heartily sorry.”

On Sunday, he shared a Facebook post that compared unauthorized immigrants to “rabid, messy, mean raccoons,” and said Donald Trump is the only exterminator who can handle the job.

“There is this one guy and he guarantees you to get rid of them, so you hire him. You don’t care if the guy smells, you don’t care if the guy swears, you don’t care if he’s an alcoholic, you don’t care how many times he’s been married, you don’t care if he voted for Obama,” it said.

To be sure, it was a “bonehead” decision to post this. He didn’t even write it himself. He just copy-pasted it from a friend, and had only meant “to illustrate, however poorly, one of the reasons our President was elected.”

Give the man this: In that respect, it was a wild success.

Who in this state has done a better of illustrating Trump’s appeal — aside from maybe Sen. Michael Doherty, who feels “denigrated” as a white man, and would be more comfortable if we stopped taking immigrants from certain “non-European” nations?

Blood was not even trying to stoke the fires of intolerance. He copied this post because he wanted to show that Trump, however crude, is seen as a problem-solver by his fans.

But what he shared was incredibly revealing. It regarded immigrants as sub-human, and he didn’t seem to get it. He exposed his bigotry by accident.

So this is not just about one bozo official in Mendham. This is the story of why our president was elected, and what’s at the core of Trumpism.

Versions of this exact same Facebook post have been circulating among Trump supporters for more than two years. In 2016, the co-chair of Trump’s campaign in New York, Carl Paladino – who once ran for governor and lost to Andrew Cuomo – said something strikingly similar.

Trump is an “exterminator” appealing to voters frustrated with government, he argued, who want “the raccoons out of the basement.”

You see how people become accustomed to this kind of rhetoric. The president himself says he’s defending Americans from contaminating invaders like the Haitians, who “all have AIDS.” (In reality, it’s about 2 percent of Haiti’s population).

The people coming into this country are “savage,” he says, the “worst of the worst.” This is why we need to build a wall. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

So why not raccoons?

During the Nazi era, Jews were depicted as rats. Officials incited the Rwandan genocide by calling Tutsis “cockroaches” that needed to be exterminated. As one bigot wrote on Facebook, the rabid raccoon post “was the perfect analogy for our current infestation of illegal…